Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (19 page)

German naval chiefs had similar misgivings – again, on practical and propagandistic rather than humanitarian grounds. Writing to his admiral on 22 September, the day after High Command's broad-brush planning meeting, a liaison officer attached to Army Group North said that he personally doubted that Leningrad could be destroyed without a single German soldier setting foot in it:

 

Four or five million people [sic] don't let themselves get killed so easily. I saw this for myself in Kovno, where the Latvians shot 6,000 Jews, among them women and children. Even a people as brutal as the Latvians could no longer bear the sight of these murders by the end. The whole action then ran into the sand. How much harder this will be with a city of millions.

Besides, this would in my opinion let loose a worldwide storm of indignation, which we can't afford politically.

 

Razing Leningrad, he also pointed out, meant denying the Kriegsmarine the use of its naval dockyards, which might come in useful given that the final fight with Britain and America was still to come. ‘After all, Leningrad can disappear at a later stage, when we have won the war at sea.' Like the army planners, he came up with the surreal suggestion of inviting the Allies to take off civilians in ships. ‘If England and the USA refuse, world opinion will blame them for these people's demise. If they accept, we're rid of the problem and it will cost them considerable freight capacity.'
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Hitler – ‘the hardest man in Europe' as he liked to call himself – was only irritated by this ‘sentimentality'. ‘I suppose', he declared over supper on 25 September, ‘that some people are clutching their heads trying to answer the question – How can the Führer destroy a city like St Petersburg? Plainly I belong by nature to quite another species!'
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He reiterated his determination not to waver in a notorious directive to Army Group North four days later:

 

Subject: the future of the City of Petersburg

 

The Führer is determined to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban centre. Finland has likewise shown no interest in the maintenance of the city immediately on its new border.

It is intended to encircle the city and level it to the ground by means of artillery bombardment using every calibre of shell, and continual bombing from the air.

Following the city's encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.
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The formal orders – no acceptance of surrender; the city to be worn down by bombing and artillery fire; civilians to be fired upon if they approached the German lines – were issued by Jodl on 7 October. They did not, however, quite close down the debate. ‘Today', Army Group North commander von Leeb confided to his diary, ‘OKW's [Armed Forces High Command's] decision on Leningrad arrived, according to which a capitulation may not be accepted. [We] sent a letter to OKH [Army High Command] asking whether in this case Russian troops can be taken into captivity. If not, the Russians will keep up a desperate fight, which will demand sacrifices on our side, probably heavy ones.'
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Officers also continued to worry about the practicability of asking their men to fire on fleeing civilians. Returning from a tour of the front line on 24 October, von Leeb's head of staff passed on a divisional commander's opinion that his men would carry out such an order once, but that in case of repeated breakouts ‘he doubted whether they would hold their nerve so as to shoot again and again on women, children and defenceless old men'. Though it was ‘fully understood that the millions of people encircled in Leningrad could not be fed by us without this having a negative impact on our own country', such orders might cause ‘the German soldier to lose his inner balance, so that even after the war he will not be able to hold back from acts of violence'. The sight of thousands of refugees streaming south through Gatchina and Pleskau, he noted, had already demoralised German troops repairing roads in the area, since ‘where they are going and how they feed themselves cannot be established. One has the impression that sooner or later they will die of hunger.' Commander-in-chief Brauchitsch's response was to suggest that soldiers be spared the psychological strain of killing women and children close to by doing so from further away, with minefields and long-distance artillery. Once the Red Army units around Leningrad had surrendered, German units could even temporarily be transferred to quarters. ‘Even then a large part of the civilian population will perish, but at least not right in front of our eyes.'
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In the event, the problems remained hypothetical. Leningrad's leadership never tried to negotiate surrender, nor did ordinary Leningraders ever attempt mass breakout. Germany did not follow her own, muddled, policy either. No gaps were ever left open in the German lines so as to allow disease-bearing starvation survivors to flee into unoccupied Russia; on the contrary, barges and lorries carrying evacuees across Lake Ladoga were repeatedly attacked. For the next three winters, the Wehrmacht prosecuted a classical siege, preventing, so far as possible, all movement of people and goods in and out of the city, and using air and ground bombardment to destroy food stocks, utilities, factories, hospitals, schools and housing. (‘It is particularly important', a Führer Directive issued just before the first air raids explained, ‘to destroy the water supply.'
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) Mass starvation, it should be stressed, was not an unforeseen, or regrettable but necessary, by-product of this strategy, but its central plank, routinely referred to with approval in planning documents, and followed, once it set in, with eager interest by military intelligence.

It was a crime, as Germans have only recently begun uncomfortably to acknowledge, not of the Nazis, but of the army. Goebbels and Himmler were enthusiastic cheerleaders for exterminating Slavs, but had no major input to the decisions on Leningrad, which were the work of Hitler, Halder, Brauchitsch, Jodl and von Leeb. Though members of High Command began sharply to disagree with Hitler within weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, they did so only on narrow grounds of military expediency. Ethical considerations do not seem to have prompted a single senior officer to question a policy that directly led, not only foreseeably but deliberately, to the slow and painful death by starvation of about three-quarters of a million non-combatants, a large proportion of them women and children.

Nor was the army made fully to atone after the war. Jodl, signatory of the formal order to besiege Leningrad, went before the international tribunal at Nuremberg, was convicted of war crimes and hanged. Von Leeb, in contrast, got off extraordinarily lightly. Having retired pleading illness in December 1941, he was sentenced to a mere three years' imprisonment at Nuremberg. His replacement as leader of Army Group North, Georg von Küchler, though sentenced to twenty years, was released on compassionate grounds after only eight. Oddest were the fates of Halder and Erich Hoepner, commander of Army Group North's Panzer Group Four. Hoepner, though a fanatical racist – praised by the SS for his ‘particularly close and cordial' cooperation in the murder of tens of thousands of Baltic Jews
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– was persuaded by the prospect of defeat to join the July Plot to assassinate Hitler. When it failed he was arrested and executed, alongside the brave and decent von Stauffenberg and von Trott. Halder, though not involved in the plot, was imprisoned by Hitler in its wake, then freed by the Americans and spared prosecution at Nuremberg in exchange for giving evidence against his former colleagues. He went on to spend fourteen comfortable and respected years as head of the German section of the US Army's historical research unit, in which role he helped to establish the Cold War myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht', ignorant of the Holocaust and bullied into war by a crazed dictator. In 1961, when the unit was wound up, President Kennedy awarded him the ‘Meritorious Civilian Service' medal – the highest honour a non-American can earn in US government service. The editor's foreword to the standard American translation of Halder's diary, published in the late 1980s, concludes with the remarkable words ‘He was a distinguished soldier'.
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*
Interviewed after the war, General Blumentritt recalled that he and his colleagues were gripped by the French general Armand de Caulaincourt's account of 1812: ‘I can still see von Kluge trudging through the mud from his sleeping-quarters to his office, and standing in front of the map with Caulaincourt's book in his hand.'

7

‘To Our Last Heartbeat'

At five minutes to seven on the evening of 8 September the optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev was walking along Sadovaya when the usual cacophony of sirens, factory hooters and ships' foghorns sounded an air-raid warning. Standing under an archway with other passers-by, he heard the drone of engines overhead. He was already used to the silver specks, high in the sky, of German reconnaissance aircraft, but these were different: snub-nosed grey bombers, twenty or more, swimming low over the rooftops in strict, purposeful formation. Somewhere nearby, an anti-aircraft gun started to bark. Suddenly the avenue of sky between the rooftops was full of sparkling tracer bullets, and quickly dissolving puffs of white smoke. When the alarm was over Lazarev continued on his way to a cousin's flat on the Fontanka. There he found his relatives gathered on the balcony, gazing to the south. Beyond the curve of the canal a vast, spherical cloud was rising, black in places and blindingly white in others. Gradually it expanded to fill the sky, itself turned bronze by the setting sun. ‘It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I could not comprehend that it was a fire . . . It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty.'
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Vera Inber and her husband had gone, despite the day's endless alerts, to the Musical Comedy Theatre on Arts Square, to see Strauss's
Die Fledermaus
. They had also invited her husband's deputy at the Erisman – a shrewd, clever man, Inber thought, with an amusing rural accent. During the interval there was yet another alert. ‘The manager came out to the foyer to say a few words, his manner as casual as if he were announcing a change in the cast. He requested that we stand as close to the walls as possible, since – here he pointed to the domed ceiling – there was little protection overhead.' After forty minutes the all-clear sounded, and the operetta continued, though at a faster pace and omitting the less important numbers. Leaving the theatre, Inber and her husband still did not realise that the alert had been anything more than the usual false alarm. To their surprise they were met by their driver, though they had not asked him to wait. ‘The car rounded the square and suddenly we saw black, swirling mountains of smoke, illuminated from below by flames. All hell had been let loose in the sky. Kovrov turned and said quietly “The Germans dropped bombs and set the food stores on fire.”' Burning were oil storage tanks, a creamery, and thirty-eight wooden warehouses – known as the ‘Badayev warehouses' after a pre-revolutionary owner – next to the Warsaw railway station, in which was stored a substantial proportion of the city's food.
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This first major raid was of incendiaries – narrow, flanged cylinders which began to smoulder on impact unless doused with sand by the civil defence teams standing guard on the city's roofs.
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A second raid, at 10.34 on the same evening, nobody could mistake for a drill: it was of forty-eight high-explosive bombs, ranging from 250 to 500 kilograms in weight, and killed twenty-four people, mostly around the Smolniy and Finland railway station. Also hit was the city zoo, next to the Peter and Paul Fortress. A staff member, a child and seventy animals were killed, including the zoo's famous elephant, Betty, who had come to Petersburg from Hamburg six years before the Revolution. The monkeys were so traumatised, a zoologist noted, that ‘for a few days afterwards they sat silently, in a sort of stupor, not even reacting to the shells falling all around'.
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Olga Berggolts sat out the raid in the hallway of her flat. ‘For two whole hours my legs shook and my heart thumped, though outwardly I remained calm. I wasn't consciously frightened, but how my legs trembled – ugh!' As soon as it was over she ran to the Radio House to meet her colleague and lover Yuri Makogonenko. She loved her invalid husband, she confided to her diary, and knew that her affair with Yuri was ‘a whim', but wanted ‘one more triumph . . . Let me see him thirsty, frenzied, happy . . . before the whistling death.' She also wanted, despite the endless tension between loving her country and hating its government, to keep on working: ‘Tomorrow I have to write a good editorial. I have to write it from the heart, with what remains of my faith . . . Nowadays I find it hard to put pen to paper, yet my pen moves, though my thoughts knock about in my head.'
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The blitz on Leningrad lasted off and on for the whole of the siege. It was at its most severe in the siege's first weeks, then fell off first with the diversion of the Eighth Air Corps to Moscow, and again with the onset of deep, aircraft-grounding winter cold, before resuming in the spring of 1942. Altogether, according to Soviet sources, about 69,000 incendiary and 4,250 high-explosive bombs hit the city during the war. Though their total tonnage was not nearly as heavy as that which landed on London, Leningrad was geographically a much smaller city, and not only bombed but also increasingly heavily shelled, the pattern of bombing by night and gunfire by day taking a relentless toll on nerves, sleep and lives. In all 16,747 civilians were killed by enemy fire in Leningrad during the war, and more than 33,000 wounded.
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